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Suggestions to simplify weapons usage in space (autofire alternatives)
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I had posted this late in Open Beta but it got archived away, so I figured I'd repost it here since this is where more auto-fire threads are. Below are some suggestions I came up with to make using weapons easier in combat in space. And yeah, it's long so sorry on that.
The Problem
Currently, the source of grief for most folks in the auto-fire threads is that we seem to have a case of button overload in the game. Late game you'll be flying a ship with 8 buttons and 2 hotbars full of abilities. So you'll have 3 hotbars of attacks and abilities to manage, all while flying your ship in combat. To make it easier to focus on the flying and abilities usage, most players are hammering the space bar key rather than fire 8 attacks by hand.
The downside of the current "fire all" process is (ignoring EPS devices like I used on my cruiser) is it causes weapons drain, thereby weaking your attacks a little. But that isn't enough of a deterrent so it's stille asier to just fire all beams to let you focus on the rest of the things to worry about.
Instead of just allowing us to set the "fire all" on autofire (basically a space bar spam), here are my ideas on how to make managing weapons in combat easier:
Add directional "fire all" support
Add a "Fire All/Energy/Projectile Aft" and "Fire All/Energy/Projectile Forward" command and allow us to bind those or drag those to hotbars. At least then I can choose to fire half my weapons when I want to versus all of them. And by allowing me to specify energy vs projectile I can only fire forward beams, etc.
I know that this may not seem that useful if you're coming straight on or away from a target because then your other side's weapons won't fire anyways, but I'm thinking more of cruisers and science vessels where you can broadside, and it might be preferable to cycle forward and aft broadsides in that scenario to cut down the power drain and increase damage as a result
Allow weapon slot designation (Aft 1-4, Forward 1-4)
Basically, I think that weapons should by designated by their slot, not what's in them. This allows us to use binds that say "Fire weapon in slot 1" for example, which enables recursive binding capabilities to allow us to cycle weapons. Say for example I have 4 forward beam arrays, call them Fwd1-Fwd4. I could write a bind then that did the following, assuming Fwd1 is on autofire:
1) Press button4 to fire Fwd2, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd3
2) Press button4 to fire Fwd3, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd4
3) Press button4 to fire Fwd4, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd2, repeating the cycle
Now I can cycle my weapons with a single button. You can do this currently if you put all your attacks in a tray and do callouts to the tray specifically, but this approach means you don't have to worry about slotting them in trays first. It also makes sense if you do this to enable the next suggestion, which is the big one.
Allow weapon "clustering"
Give us the capability to fire 2 energy weapons from 1 action. As a compromise, I'd say only allow us to merge the same weapon type (array, dual beams, etc). So I could say fire the arrays in slots 1-2 at once.
For ease of implementation, I'd say given my suggestion above on named weapon positions link Fwd1-2, Fwd3-4 together and force folks to slot appropriately if they want to use this. The main reason I ask for this is to have fewer buttons. If I have 8 attacks, and say 2 of them are torpedoes, I'm left with 6 attack buttons. If I could chain them, I could leave 1 forward and 1 aft on autofire, and now leave myself with 2 buttons to worry about. Or. for the sake of argument, I could have a ship with 8 beam arrays and only have 4 buttons to worry about.
The Problem
Currently, the source of grief for most folks in the auto-fire threads is that we seem to have a case of button overload in the game. Late game you'll be flying a ship with 8 buttons and 2 hotbars full of abilities. So you'll have 3 hotbars of attacks and abilities to manage, all while flying your ship in combat. To make it easier to focus on the flying and abilities usage, most players are hammering the space bar key rather than fire 8 attacks by hand.
The downside of the current "fire all" process is (ignoring EPS devices like I used on my cruiser) is it causes weapons drain, thereby weaking your attacks a little. But that isn't enough of a deterrent so it's stille asier to just fire all beams to let you focus on the rest of the things to worry about.
Instead of just allowing us to set the "fire all" on autofire (basically a space bar spam), here are my ideas on how to make managing weapons in combat easier:
Add directional "fire all" support
Add a "Fire All/Energy/Projectile Aft" and "Fire All/Energy/Projectile Forward" command and allow us to bind those or drag those to hotbars. At least then I can choose to fire half my weapons when I want to versus all of them. And by allowing me to specify energy vs projectile I can only fire forward beams, etc.
I know that this may not seem that useful if you're coming straight on or away from a target because then your other side's weapons won't fire anyways, but I'm thinking more of cruisers and science vessels where you can broadside, and it might be preferable to cycle forward and aft broadsides in that scenario to cut down the power drain and increase damage as a result
Allow weapon slot designation (Aft 1-4, Forward 1-4)
Basically, I think that weapons should by designated by their slot, not what's in them. This allows us to use binds that say "Fire weapon in slot 1" for example, which enables recursive binding capabilities to allow us to cycle weapons. Say for example I have 4 forward beam arrays, call them Fwd1-Fwd4. I could write a bind then that did the following, assuming Fwd1 is on autofire:
1) Press button4 to fire Fwd2, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd3
2) Press button4 to fire Fwd3, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd4
3) Press button4 to fire Fwd4, then rebind button4 to next time fire Fwd2, repeating the cycle
Now I can cycle my weapons with a single button. You can do this currently if you put all your attacks in a tray and do callouts to the tray specifically, but this approach means you don't have to worry about slotting them in trays first. It also makes sense if you do this to enable the next suggestion, which is the big one.
Allow weapon "clustering"
Give us the capability to fire 2 energy weapons from 1 action. As a compromise, I'd say only allow us to merge the same weapon type (array, dual beams, etc). So I could say fire the arrays in slots 1-2 at once.
For ease of implementation, I'd say given my suggestion above on named weapon positions link Fwd1-2, Fwd3-4 together and force folks to slot appropriately if they want to use this. The main reason I ask for this is to have fewer buttons. If I have 8 attacks, and say 2 of them are torpedoes, I'm left with 6 attack buttons. If I could chain them, I could leave 1 forward and 1 aft on autofire, and now leave myself with 2 buttons to worry about. Or. for the sake of argument, I could have a ship with 8 beam arrays and only have 4 buttons to worry about.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
i will still hammer spacebar, i cannot see how your suggestion makes ANYTHING better.
actually, its worse since now i also have to memorize which button fires what weapon group.... and have more buttons overall to clogg up the screen.
Not to mention the whole thing is redundant.
If hes in my front, i can only fire front weapon anyway, if hes at my back, only back weapons fire.
Having separate groups there does exactly NOTHING.
Simply give us autofire on all the weapon we want. DONE.
To be honest, remove autofire completely. IMO
The advantage of firing only half your weapons at once is less power drain, so your attacks do more damage. I thought I commented in my post that if you're not in the aft arc you already get this for free, but you could cycle forward and aft and get less power drain, which results in more damage.
And being able to group weapons means up to 1/2 the # of weapons buttons, so less to worry about than the current solution, and makes the space bar spamming less of a need.
Setting the current "fire all" to spam is inefficient because of the power drain, and the need to slot EPS devices to counteract it vs other engineering devices.